Letters to the editor

Don't target the wallets
of longtime Citizens clients

Re: "Controlling Citizens" (Our Opinion, Feb. 17).

About 25 years ago (pre-Citizens), we bought a cottage on the ground at Carrabelle Beach. Hurricane Dennis flooded it and made it virtually uninhabitable. We debated several years about remodeling or rebuilding. In 2004, with Citizens as an incentive, we built a new house, this time on pilings 9 feet off the ground to satisfy Citizens, FEMA and county requirements. To do that I've spent $30,000-plus for pilings, $1,000 for engineering and $3,300 to drive the pilings and set the base structure on the pilings, to have a house that will be safe from another surge.

None of this would have been required to remodel on the ground. Now there is talk of increasing Citizens premiums on a house that meets current 130-mph wind or hurricane code and is well above any surge potential. It is unfair to put Citizens out there as an incentive to build during a construction slump and now increase its cost to those of us who relied on that incentive. I won't say that we wouldn't have built without Citizens, but it certainly was a well advertised incentive. Prohibit Citizens from insuring new development as suggested in your Sunday editorial, but don't eliminate it or make it more expensive for those who relied on it as an incentive when it was new.

WILSON WRIGHT

wwright@nettally.com

'Fillmore' comic had
no place in Sunday paper

Sunday's "Mallard Fillmore" was repulsive and has no place on a family-oriented comic page. For that matter, I have difficulty deciding whether it should be in any section of the Democrat, as it has long passed from what might be acceptable political satire appealing to the angry right-wing fringe and has become sick and twisted.

Anyone who might find this kind of political pornography amusing, or acceptable in polite discourse, is not worthy of your publication. Get rid of it altogether or at least relegate it to a back page. It's not funny, it's not clever, it is entirely offensive.

EDWIN J. CONKLIN

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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